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The Dangers of A Course in Miracles

We’ve been asked about the content of the book, A Course in Miracles, and whether or not this is appropriate reading for Catholics. The answer to this question is an emphatic “no”!

For those who have never heard of it, the Course, more popularly known as “the New Age Bible,” is a program designed to eradicate the Judeo-Christian worldview in the reader and impose a philosophy that is utterly contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

For example, the Course teaches that there is no sin and that guilt and suffering have no purpose. It is also riddled with heretical treatments of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and the entire doctrine of salvation.

The Course originated in 1965 with a prominent clinical and research psychologist and Associate Professor of Medical Psychology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City named Helen Schucman, Ph.D. Schucman claimed to have “channeled” Jesus Christ who dictated the Course to her over a period of seven years. She claims Jesus Christ began speaking to her very unexpectedly one day, saying “This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.” The dictation, which came in the form of an intellectual locution, went on for the next seven years.

Essentially, the Course teaches that we all live in heaven with God and that our lives on earth are just a bad dream.

“We don’t have to die in order to go Heaven. We just have to wake up,” explains former New Age practitioner and author, Moira Noonan in her book, Ransomed from Darkness.

“Each of us is exactly and entirely the way God created us to be: sinless and wholly innocent. The Course is adamant about this. There is no sin.”

According to this distorted theology, men and women don’t require salvation in the biblical sense because they are already divine. But it goes even further, teaching that sin, guilt, death, judgment, propitiatory atonement, and other biblical doctrines are “attack” philosophies, meaning they are concepts that stand in the way of spiritual progress and the realization of our true divine nature.

In order to achieve this way of thinking, participants practice a lesson every day from the workbook for a period of one year.

“The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world,” says the introduction to the on-line version of A Course in Miracles.

The exercises are separated into two sections, the first dealing with “the undoing of the way you see now, and the second with the acquisition of true perception.”

For instance, in the first lesson, students are taught that “Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything.” For a few minutes in the morning and at night, they are to look at the objects around them and say things like, “This table doesn’t mean anything,” or “This hand doesn’t mean anything.”

Although it might sound silly, it’s only the beginning. By lesson 96, students are being taught that “Salvation comes from my one self.” By lesson number 303, students are chanting, “The holy Christ is born in me today.”

The late Father Groeschel, who personally knew Schucman while studying under her at Columbia, felt deep compassion for the woman whose writings in the Course denied all suffering, and yet who spent the last years of her life in one of the blackest psychotic depressions he had ever witnessed.

“It was almost frightening to be with her,” he wrote. “I clearly observed that the denial of the reality of suffering could have catastrophic consequences.”

Father Groeschel believes the Course, which also includes beliefs from Christian Science, which Schucman was exposed to as a child, is a good example of a false revelation.

“There is also the unorthodox representation of Christ, who is by no means denied, but so distorted that the ‘Son of God’ becomes a vague mystical figure who conveniently fits into any doctrinal crevice the individual may carve out for him.”

With its gentle but distorted presentation of the Gospel, combined with a daily dose of repetitive mental exercises, the Course has grown into what Father Groeschel describes as a “sophisticated cult” whose followers are “caught up in a general wave of Gnosticism that one observes as genuine religious conviction wanes in our society.”

This book belongs on the top of the list of books that should not be read by any follower of Christ.